There are many ways in which 24 Hours of LeMons competitors can attempt to play fast and loose with the series rules. Cheater-spec parts are the most obvious, of course. Hide some upgraded bits deep in your engine and hope the tech folks won’t find it all. They will, but bravo for trying. There’s another way to cheat that sounds intriguing and would take a lot more work to pull it off.
Welcome to the Eyesore Multi-Car Loophole Gambit.
The idea is to run identical cars in an effort to minimize time spent during pit stops or driver changes.
It’s as hilarious as it is insane… but could it work? For one, you’d have to perfectly copy your original car. You would then have to make sure the other car was hidden until it needed to be called into duty. Have the second car gassed up with a driver waiting to go as the original car pulls into the pits, and you could have a clean switcheroo on your hands.
Of course, the moment you make this move everyone in the pits would figure out something insane was happening. But is it against the rules? Is there a LeMons loophole that would allow for such a Smokey Yunick-esque level of trickery?
Let’s check the rulebook
Technically, it would seem that LeMons rules clearly define an “Entry” as consisting of “one racecar and at least two drivers existing for one race.” A “Team”, however, is defined as “one or more Entries in one or more races, all sharing one Team Name, one Team Concept, and one Team Captain; it exists for as long as the Team Captain chooses. An Entry’s minimum driver count is two; there is no maximum number of drivers, crew, random friends, professional therapists in rumpled gauzy Eileen Fisher outfits, etc.”
The loophole could be that a team enters and attempts to run the mimicked racing machines under the guise of a team and not an entry. Could this be a workaround the single vehicle per entry limit? It’s certainly possible, and a bored lawyer could probably write up a document to work through this loophole.
It would likely be shut down quickly, as both cars would need to be run through the tech inspection and cleared. Otherwise, the team would get kicked out extremely quickly for running a non-inspected car even if the other version of the car already cleared tech.
It would be fun to see a team (and not an entry) give this a shot. Though the headache of getting identical LeMons cars running, and running well, makes this effort foolish at best.
Which means there’s definitely a team considering it right now…
Leave a Reply